by Mark Stone
The entire place was empty. I was starting to get the feeling that a ship like this ran in the designated crowd areas and was sort of barren in all the others. There were activities that ran every night, and given that this cruise was targeted for adults, they ran all night. That left the corridors that housed the rooms pretty barren, and that was both a good and a bad thing. On one hand, I didn’t need people around here who might get hurt. If I was afraid I might get myself killed just by trying to protect Random, then I’d be as good as roadkill if this place were packed. Still, it gave this guy a freedom he wouldn’t otherwise have. He could move around unchecked in a way he otherwise wouldn’t be able to if there were people to see him.
“Here, take this,” Random said, tapping me on the shoulder. Looking at her, I saw she was holding a gun, the same gun she shot into the air when she and I were confronted with the Rascal boys. “You have a bad tendency to go into dangerous places unarmed. I can’t tell if it’s subconscious yet. Either way, it’s stupid.”
I grabbed the gun, grimacing at her as I wrapped my fingers around the butt, letting my trigger finger rest lightly where it belonged.
“How long have you been researching me?” I asked, turning back to the hallway and surveying the area for signs of where the Russian might have run off to.
“Long enough to be utterly fascinated,” Random admitted. It was in that moment that I realized that the woman’s voice might have been a little tired, but there was no fear in it. In fact, if anything, she was exhilarated. I could practically hear Davey chuckling at me in my brain and asking me if that reminded me of anyone.
“You’re too easy to satisfy,” I said quickly. “Which pains me to say, because usually, it’s my favorite quality in a woman.”
“I’m actually quite the opposite,” Random answered. “I had three different majors in college. I aced them all, but none of them ever felt right. Everything felt like I was just wasting my time until this.”
“Until a radio show?” I asked, scrunching my face up without realizing I was doing it.
“Until the truth,” she answered. “It’s not about a radio show or a podcast or even a streaming show. All of this, everything I’ve ever done, has been about finding the truth. It’s the only thing that matters, and do you want to know why?”
“I feel like you’re going to tell me anyway, so sure,” I answered, though the truth was that something about what the woman was saying pulled at me.
“Bad stuff happens, and you can fight it if you want. Hell, fighting it is all we can do, I guess. But there are different ways to fight bad stuff. You can fight it with your hands. You can beat it back until it’s running away scared, and that’s good. But it doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t solve the real problem.”
”And what is the real problem?” I asked.
“The real problem is that when you beat it back and send it running, the bad stuff just hides away in the dark. It just waits until the next time it can come running out,” Random said. “But if you expose it, if you find the truth and tell it to everyone who will listen, then the dark doesn’t exist anymore. There’s only light, and no one can hide in the light.”
I pulled to a stop, thinking about what the woman had just said. “You know,” I muttered, “that’s actually kind of—”
“Lucky!” Random said in a hushed gasp, pointing at the door on our right. “Look.”
She didn’t have to say it twice. My eyes followed her right to the doorknob in question, stained with blood.
She grabbed my arm, squeezing it tightly. “He’s in there. He has to be.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Or he’d want you to think that.”
“What?” Random asked, looking up at me.
“This is too easy,” I said. “It’s too obvious. Look around, Random. There’s no blood anywhere. Not on the floor, not on the walls. There wasn’t even a speck to tell us which direction he might have gone.”
“I told you, his left-footed nature did that, and as it turns out, I was right,” the woman said.
“I’m not so sure you were,” I said, the wheels in my head turning fast. “It’s too obvious. What if this is what he wants us to think?”
“To what end?” Random asked.
“Stand back,” I said, pushing the woman away from the doorway just a little.
“What are you gonna do?” Random asked, her eyes narrowing into slits as she did what I said.
“What I always do,” I answered. “Something stupid.” Taking a deep breath, I kicked the door open and lunged in the other direction.
Colliding with Random and knocking us both to the floor, I heard a gunshot ring throughout the hallway. With my entire body clenching, I looked up. Pointing the gun in the air, I waited for the man to come out. But I knew better. He wasn’t here. This was something else.
“Stay here,” I murmured to Random. Crawling across the floor, I looked through the now open doorway. A gun sat there on a homemade mechanism. A string had been tied to it, weighted with a pulley. When I kicked the door open, it caused the gun to shoot.
“What is it?” Random asked as I sat up.
“Proof that I was right,” I answered. “Proof that—” Just then, it all came together in my head. “Oh, God,” I gasped.
“What?” Random asked, moving toward me across the floor.
“Hide in the dark,” I said. “The bad stuff, it hides in the dark until it can run back out. What if that’s what they were doing? What if you haven’t been the only one watching? What if they’ve been watching us? What if they knew you were connected to me? What if he knew you’d bring me and Scott back there? What if—”
“He waited in the other hallway until we passed,” Random shrieked, her hand going to her mouth instinctively. “He doubled back around!”
“We have to move!” I yelled. Getting up, I hauled ass back the way I came from. Random followed quickly, panting every bit as hard as me.
As we rushed down the hallway and past where it diverged, an alarm sounded throughout the ship. I knew what it was. They had either found the janitor or heard the gunshot. Either way, this place was going into panic mode, and I had been on enough cruise ships to know what that meant. They told you on the first day, for God’s sake. This place was going into lockdown.
I turned the corner and saw them. Scott and Charlotte stood there. There were others, people I didn’t recognize leaned over the janitor. The alarms were screaming through the air. Then, I saw them. The Russian man and woman. They were walking up behind them, unseen by anyone but Random and me.
“Run!” I screamed, rushing toward them with my hands waving wildly. “Run!” But my voice didn’t carry against the alarms. I pulled to a stop, pointing my gun at the man and woman who were ready to hurt my friends.
As I did, though, the doors between them and I slammed shut, locking loudly. They kept me out of where I needed to be, but more importantly, they locked Charlotte and Scott in with the very people who wanted to do them harm.
21
I slammed my body hard against the locked double doors. They, of course, didn’t move. I wasn’t sure why I might have expected them to. I had seen enough moving and tugged at enough locked doors to know that they don’t just throw themselves open because you want them to. That didn’t stop me, though. All I could think about was Scott and Charlotte on the other side of that door. All I could see was those Russians putting bullets in their heads as well as the heads of all those who were with them. Even if it wouldn’t make any difference, I couldn’t stop. I had to keep trying.
“You’re going to break your arm!” Random said, pushing me as I tried for the fifth time to slam my body against the double doors. “It’s not going to open, Lucky!”
“It has to!” I shouted, the alarms blaring throughout the sliver of hallway we were allotted.
“Yeah. Well, it’s not!” she answered. “That’s not the way it works. These doors are closed and locked, and they’re going to stay that way until t
hey’re not. You know that.”
I did know that, unfortunately. I knew all of it. Still, I needed to believe something else was possible because otherwise, I’d just be standing here doing nothing. And I couldn’t have that. I just couldn’t.
“Then we have to find a different way,” I said, looking around me with even more intensity than I had when I was looking for the Russian.
“Think, Lucky!” Random said. “This happens to seal out water in the event of a shipwreck. You really think you’re going to be able to get through somewhere water can’t? This is impossible.”
“I don’t believe in impossible,” I answered, looking back at the door.
“That’s a quintessentially stupid and masculine thing to say,” Random said.
“Yeah,” I muttered, rearing back and readying to throw myself into the doors again. “But look at the source.”
Screaming loudly, I rushed toward the door. The lights changed and the alarm stopped an instant before my shoulder slammed into the door. As it did, the damn things swung open, depositing me on the floor hard enough to cause me to roll over.
“That was a coincidence,” Random said, walking up behind me as I stood up. “I don’t want you to think that was some sort of testosterone-drenched victory for you. It wasn't. The doors happened to unlock right as you were hitting them.”
“You just hate the idea of my having a win. Don’t you?” I asked, popping up off the floor.
“I do,” she muttered. “Though I’m not exactly sure why.”
Looking forward, I saw Charlotte on her knees, her hands above her head and clasped together. She was crying, and everyone else in the room followed suit, all of them on their knees, all of them looking at the wall.
“Charlotte!” I yelled, rushing toward her. Kneeling down, I scooped the teary woman into a hug. Her entire body was shaking.
“They took him,” she cried into my shoulder. “I tried to stop them, but I couldn’t. They took Scott, John!”
“Are you okay?” I asked, knocking lightly on the door of Charlotte’s room, even though I entered before she answered anyway. She had just taken a shower. So, the woman who changed my life forever sat on the bed with her knees tucked up under her chin, dressed in a bathrobe with wet hair brushed straight and running down her back.
She swallowed hard and forced a smile before she looked at me. “I’m okay,” she lied. “You shouldn’t worry about me.”
“I absolutely should. You’re here because of me,” I answered. “And even if I shouldn’t, it’s not like I can stop myself. You’re important to me, Charlotte.”
I walked over and sat on the foot of the bed, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. She was cold, but she wasn’t shivering like before.
“Did they find Scott yet?” she asked, wiping her nose.
“They haven’t,” I said, looking up at the ceiling. “Oliver has his people on it, including Maxwell, but honestly, I’m not sure how much stock I put into any of them.”
“We should be looking,” Charlotte said.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I said. “We made such a mess of things earlier, and you’ve been through a lot.”
“Not as much as you,” she spat back. “Not nearly as much.”
“It’s not a competition, Charlotte,” I said. “No one is expecting you to—”
“I expect it of myself,” she shot back. “When that man held me up before, the day you were up in Grayville, that wasn’t the first time. It wasn’t even close. It was just the first time that I ever saw anyone do anything about it, and do you know what kind of reaction I had to watching you take that guy out, John?”
“Well,” I said, shuffling. “Judging by what we did later on that night, I’m guessing it was attraction.”
“Don’t be stupid. That happened before the guy came in,” she said. “I felt resentful. I felt like this was what I should have been doing all along. I felt like a chump for ever allowing anyone to take advantage of me like that. You opened my eyes to that. Even more than the ten million dollars, that was the gift you gave me.” She shrugged. “Although, the ten million dollars is nice.”
“I’m glad you like it,” I said, smiling a little. “And I’m glad I could help you, even though I was just doing what I thought was right. Still, there’s a difference between finding yourself in a situation and actively searching it out. You don’t have to do any of this.”
“Has that ever stopped you?” she asked.
Suddenly, I realized that I sounded a lot like Davey and that Charlotte was sounding a lot like me. Who was I to tell her what she could and couldn’t do when I wouldn’t listen to my best friend about the same thing?
“No,” I admitted. “No, it hasn’t.”
“Didn’t think so,” she said. Then, looking over at me, she added, “I know I might look weak right now, but I’m not. We have a job to do here. We didn’t come for nothing.”
“Well, maybe we did,” I answered. “This ship is turning course. We’re stopping at Cabbage Key, wherever the hell that is.”
“It’s off Pine Island Sound,” Charlotte said, resting her head on my shoulder. “Wendy told me about a lot of it before I came down. I remember thinking my Irish grandmother would like the sound of Cabbage Key.”
“Maybe,” I answered, stifling a smile. “But I don’t like the sound of docking there. That’s for sure. We had a job to do, Charlotte, and I screwed that up. I let my friend get kidnapped and derailed this entire thing. Now, regardless of what happens or how this ends, I blew our chance at getting the Linchpin. I ruined all of this.”
“It’s not over, John,” she said. “If I’ve learned anything from you, it’s that you don’t give up. You see a problem, and you tackle it.” She pulled her head off my shoulder and stared at me intently. “We’re gonna find Scott, we’re gonna get the Linchpin, and we’re gonna save the damn world. And I guess we’re gonna do it all on Cabbage Key.” She nodded at me. “And when it’s done, you owe me a damn piña colada.”
“Okay,” I said, noticing the way she was looking at me, like I could face whatever this world had to throw at me, and feeding on that. “You got it, sweetheart.”
22
“Is this the best option here?” I asked Oliver, looking out the window in the empty buffet room and watching as Cabbage Key grew bigger and bigger in front of us. I hadn’t been able to talk to Oliver since the whole thing went down yesterday. Though I had attempted several times, I was met again and again with a brick wall made of a revolving door of bodyguards. The last one was none other than Maxwell himself. Though I got further with him than the others, going so much as to pull a smile and conversation from him, he still wouldn’t let me anywhere near Oliver. The thing was, if I wasn’t so pissed off about everything, I’d have actually been impressed by his resolve.
As it stood, I had to think outside the box, and in this instance, outside the box happened to take the shape of Oliver shoving scrambled eggs into his mouth at four thirty in the morning.
“Excuse me?” Oliver asked through a mouthful of eggs, looking up at me like I had a pistol pointed at his head.
“You heard me,” I said, folding my arms over my chest and leveling a stare at him that would have rusted metal if I would have pointed it in the right direction. “You have a missing passenger, a high-profile one at that, and the people who took him are trapped here, too, in this confined space out in the middle of the water. You pull us into Cabbage Key, and maybe that changes. Maybe Scott and the people who took him slip away. Maybe they elude your grasp once and for all.”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Oliver said, swallowing hard and wiping his mouth with a napkin. “This area isn’t open to passengers for another hour. So, if you don’t mind, please let me finish my breakfast.”
“Your breakfast can wait, bud,” I said, barely able to stop myself from clocking this bastard across the face. One of my oldest friends was missing. He might very well be dead, and this guy was priorit
izing his bacon and eggs. “We have things we need to talk about.”
Oliver sighed and stood up, throwing his napkin down on his plate in a disgusted manner. “I know what you want, Mr. Lucky. You want to go over the horrible events that happened here yesterday again and again until you find some sort of thread to pull on.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I want to find that thread that helps lead me to Scott.”
“Except that thread could very well tear my entire ship apart,” Oliver said.
“Who gives a damn about your ship? There’s a life hanging in the balance.”
“We both know that isn’t true,” Oliver stated firmly. “You’re a soldier, right, Mr. Lucky?”
“I used to be,” I answered, curious as to what he was getting at.
“Then you know how this sort of thing works,” Oliver said. “If the people who took him want Shades, or Scott, as you call him, dead, then he’s already dead. They very likely killed him as soon as they took him. If not, then they want him for another reason, and they won’t harm him until they use him for whatever reason that is. Either way, that’s not something our docking this ship is going to change.”
“You’re giving them an out,” I said loudly. “You’re going to let them escape. Can’t you see that?”
“We have every inch of this boat covered, Mr. Lucky,” Oliver answered.
“If that were true, you’d be able to find them, jackass,” I answered. “But you know that already. This isn’t about saving Scott. This is about saving face. You want the people on this ship away before this situation goes from bad to worse and they have horror stories to tell to the press.”
“Imagine what sort of horror stories they’ll have if the people who took Scott turn their sights on them,” Oliver answered. “I understand your priority is your friend, Mr. Lucky. It should be, but my priority is everyone on this ship, and letting them continue to bandy about in the Gulf while all of this is going on is both dangerous and liable. I won’t have it, and frankly, as someone who’s been through the sort of high-stakes situations that war brings, you should know better yourself.”